Читать книгу Secrets and Sins - Jaishree Misra - Страница 14

Joe woke on the morning after David’s party, unsure for a moment of where he was, blinking in confusion at the sun streaming in through the thin linen curtains. Then he groaned as he felt his stomach churn and a dull ache hit him between the eyebrows. He’d drunk way too much last night. But that had seemed the only option after that ghastly mishap with Susan and the phone call. He wasn’t sure how much she’d overheard of his conversation, especially as she’d seemed fine later, laughing and joking with David as usual.

He recalled feeling his knees physically buckle underneath him when Susan had materialised behind him in the garden of the River Café, while Kaaya’s voice had been caressing his ear. How strange was this thing called guilt – on the one hand, it had the power to make him feel as if a knife was slashing away at his insides and yet…yet, there were times when he was so completely inured to it, he could look straight into his wife’s face and lie, coolly and blatantly, without the slightest pang. Why, there had even been the day – at the birthday party Susan had recently thrown for Riva – when he had lost control and kissed Kaaya full on her lips, his hands running all over her lithe body as he pressed her against the fridge, all the while hearing Susan’s laughter in the next room. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he was himself a psychiatrist, he would have thought this behaviour a form of madness.

But that was what women like Kaaya did to men like him. She was just so beautiful and so captivating, he was like a ball of putty in her hands. Joe knew he wasn’t a weak man, never had been. Not with alcohol, not with women. It was something he prided himself on. But it was literally as though he had had no choice at all once Kaaya had set her sights on him. Of course, they had met many times over the years – he had even attended her wedding to Rohan, for Christ’s sake – and although he had long thought of her as the most gorgeous thing he had ever laid eyes on, he had never even considered flirting with her. Not least because he would never have dreamt of hurting Susan with that kind of behaviour. Now Joe realised, of course, that the only reason he had not fallen for Kaaya before was because he had thought her completely inaccessible; he had never once imagined that she would spare him more than a moment’s thought. Until that night, when they were all gathered quite casually at Riva’s house and Kaaya had caught him looking absently at her cleavage. Instead of doing that thing that women like Susan did – rather sheepishly adjusting their necklines and swiftly looking away – Kaaya had deliberately bent over to pick up an almond out of a bowl, further revealing the alluring swell of her breasts. Then she had looked up at him through her lashes and smiled knowingly as she delicately placed the almond on her tongue and chewed on it, leaning back and running one finger along the rim of her wine goblet.

That had been the start of it and Joe still felt giddy at the memory of the days that followed – the snatched flirtatious conversations at parties and restaurants edging them closer to very dangerous territory, that first kiss on Riva’s wet driveway last Christmas, stolen while the others were busy collecting their brollies and drunkenly kissing everyone else in the hallway, and finally, one frozen day in January, a long, lingering lunch at China Tang, which he had managed by pleading a trumped-up illness at work to be able to leave at midday. It was only after that lunch, convinced by Kaaya’s passionate air and seeming sincerity, that Joe had finally plucked up the courage to take their relationship to the next logical step, one he was quite sure he would not have taken for a mere physical fling. It was something he had only rather wildly dreamt about before, listening with some amusement to other people gossiping about such things in half-horrified, half-admiring tones. Adultery. Infidelity. Big words, as though it required more than a couple of syllables to express such major transgressions. At what stage exactly did one describe a relationship as adulterous? When a man first held his wife’s body and imagined she was someone else? When he first lied to a woman he barely knew about the state of his marriage, allowing a near stranger to believe that his wife of ten years could not make him happy? Even if it had to be a physical act, at what precise point in the continuum between kissing and having full-blown sex did an affair slip into the realm of infidelity? The simple truth was that, by the time Joe had decided to have sex with Kaaya, he had seemed to have no choice in the matter at all. He was, in fact, so ready to burst with love and longing for this beautiful, beautiful creature, so convinced that it was nothing short of a gift to be offered her love, that turning away from it would have seemed the bigger travesty. He had loved Susan well enough, but now it was as though he simply loved Kaaya more.

It had been a perfect day too, nothing about its clean white snow and crisp sunshine indicating that something immoral could be afoot. They had driven out that morning through the peaceful Oxfordshire countryside bathed in winter sunshine, heading for Bray. After a light lunch at a country pub – both of them being too nervous to eat very much – they had checked into a local B&B, and made fervent love all through the afternoon. It was only when the sun had started to set beyond the fields, and the plane tree outside their window was filled with the noise of returning birds, that Joe had even remembered they both had homes and spouses to get back to.

He had told Susan he was attending a day conference at Oxford and she seemed to think nothing of it when he returned late that evening, exhausted and unwilling to talk. Odd that he had never before noticed how tatty Susan’s pink bathrobe was, or how annoyingly she slurped on her mug of bedtime cocoa while watching TV. But he had managed to blank it all out, turning away from Susan in bed and pretending to be asleep until he could hear her breathing lapse into soft snores. But sleep did not come easy to him that night, his nerves jangling from being on edge – not from guilt, surprisingly, but because of the plan that had been made to spend a whole night at Kaaya’s apartment the following week. Luckily, Rohan’s job involved a great deal of travel and Susan was not unaccustomed to Joe needing to do the occasional night shift. It would not be difficult to manage.

All Joe knew that night, as he drifted into sleep remembering Kaaya’s warm, luscious body in the hotel bed, was that he could not wait – not just to make love to Kaaya all night but to experience the magic of waking up in the morning and seeing that she was not just a dream he had conjured up in the night.

Susan prepared a cafetiere full of coffee before calling up the stairs for Joe to wake up; it was a habit formed over the years since they had moved in together – eleven this year, ten since they were married and fifteen since they had first met. Susan noted the figures with sudden shock, never having been one for showy anniversary celebrations. For fifteen years, she had loved one man so wholly that the possibility of losing him now seemed so tragic it was almost laughable!

With one ear cocked for the creaks and sounds of Joe moving about upstairs, Susan made her sandwich, wrapped it in a bit of foil and tucked it into her handbag alongside an apple. Normally by the time this was done Joe would have appeared in the kitchen – tousle-haired and sleepy-eyed in his pyjamas – just in time to collect a kiss from her before she left for school. It was his job to clear away after her, of course, collecting the milk and newspaper from the doorstep and waving her off as she reversed her car down the drive.

Today, however, there was no sign of Joe, even after the sandwich had been made, and things had gone very still upstairs. Susan wondered if she ought to go up to the bedroom to make a pretence of saying goodbye. She took a quick look at her watch and hesitated. It wasn’t the lack of time – she still had ten minutes to spare – but the wrenching memory of the overheard phone call last night that was stopping her. There had been no point confronting him with it last night, not when they were surrounded by their friends and everyone had been so drunk. After that, either because of the alcohol or sheer exhaustion induced by shock, Susan had slept the sleep of the dead, waking up far too late to do her customary half hour of yoga. And there wasn’t the time to start hurling accusations at Joe right now, not when she had so little time before she needed to leave for work. It would have to wait till the evening. Or perhaps she needed to ‘gather more evidence’ first. There was every chance Joe would just deny it outright, telling her she had imagined it. Would premature questioning not merely present him with the opportunity to cover his tracks more efficiently, giving him time to come up with a plan to deceive her better? Perhaps he would even put his head together with the person he had so casually addressed as ‘darling’ to come up with a finer plan to fool her and string her along a bit more…

Who was this other woman? And why on earth would she have gone after a married man? If she knew Joe was married, that is…Susan felt her stomach twist and quelled a sudden desire to retch. What was she to do? There had never been a template for responding to a husband’s infidelity in all the books she’d read. As far as she knew, infidelity wasn’t something anyone in her inner circle had ever had to cope with anyway. Not her mum, her two sisters, or her best friend, Riva. And it was much too late to go rushing out to buy those trashy magazines she saw at the dentist’s that emblazoned problems across their covers such as: ‘My husband is gay’ or ‘He slept with my mother’…

Keeping her voice calm, Susan shouted upstairs again and this time heard Joe’s muffled voice as he emerged from the bathroom.

‘I’m off now,’ she called, before picking up her bag and shutting the door behind her. She was managing to impress herself with all this calm, poised behaviour. Of course, everyone at school had probably always seen her as impossible to ruffle, whatever the crisis at hand. Even that time when little Patrick Hoolihan had badly cut his arm and blood had gushed out of the wound in a jet that flew across the art room, it was Susan who had kept her head, stemming the flow with a tourniquet and silencing the child’s screams with a swiftly made-up story involving an ambulance that was too polite to flash its lights and scream its way through the traffic.

It was only once Susan was in the car, driving down her leafy Wimbledon road, that the magnitude of what she was so coolly coping with hit her. A social worker had once told her that cars did that to people – something about their rocking, womb-like environment making children suddenly disclose abuse and other horrors kept hidden from the world. More effective, the social worker had said, than a hundred carefully controlled psychotherapy sessions. So that was it, then. All it took was sliding into the front seat of her little blue Mini and, suddenly, Susan could feel everything magically well up inside her: a huge wave of anger and sorrow and pain that she could not hold at bay any more and that now threatened to drown her as she drove along the A23. She would have to pull in somewhere, she thought in panic as the tears started to slide uncontrolled down her face, blurring her vision. But the traffic was heavy and moving along in brisk single file on this busy Friday morning.

She tried to stem her tears. It would be shameful to walk into the school with her face all red and blotchy; what would the poor children think! But, for now, it was such sweet relief to simply let go. Susan drove on, feeling the tears roll down her cheeks and drip off her chin onto the woollen fabric of her skirt.

Somehow she made it from the car park to the school toilets without bumping into anyone. Once she had washed her face, Susan felt calmer and took out her phone. She had to talk to someone, to help restore that terrible lost sense of reality that was overwhelming her, as though she had somehow managed to wander into one of her worst nightmares.

Riva. Her best friend was the only person who could possibly help sort this tangle out.